Or
by irish-schmirish
Summary: Cher Lloyd and Niall Horan became friends on the X Factor. Will they stay friends after, when she's their opening performer for their American tour, or...?


Cher took a deep breath, drumming her freshly painted nails on the orange table of the dressing room she was sitting in. Were her nails even still able to be considered freshly done? When had they even been painted? She continued to let these petty thoughts filter through her mind just to avoid having to think about what she was about to do: perform. Oh, sure, it was no big deal, she had done it tons of times before. She loved to perform more than she loved to breathe, and she was damn good at it, too.

Tonight was different, though. Tonight she was not the opening performer, tonight she was just the opening act for a group of five boys she had known all throughout the journey that led her to where she was that day. Sure, she had come in fourth on the X Factor, but she knew it was good she had not won. She had been a mean, rude person on the X Factor, a person she wished had never existed. The boys had eventually seen through her mean persona to the person she was that day, but she still wanted to take back some things she may have said or done to some of them.

When show time came, Cher almost missed her cue to go out on the stage. It was her usual set, the one she sang every night she opened for One Direction. Her thoughts strayed often during the performance, something that hardly ever happened. She could not help it, though, because she could only think about what had happened the night before.

* * *

"Cher Bear!" Niall shouted, pulling her into a hug when he saw her sitting on a stool at the hotel bar.

"Agh!" Cher shrieked, throwing her hands up to cover her head. "The hair!"

Niall looked at her hair closely, as if he was trying to find something wrong with it. "It looks fine."

"It took me three hours to get it to look fine."

"It looks the exact same way it did onstage."

"Way to insult me, mate." Cher turned back to the bar to take a sip of her Shirley Temple, since she was not old enough to buy a drink herself in America. She caught the slight look of sadness in Niall's eyes when he glanced at the row of Irish beers placed on a shelf behind the bar. "You can't wait to get your hands on one of those again, eh?"

Niall shrugged, hopping up on the stool next to Cher's. "It's not that big of a deal. Hey, bartender! Steve, right? I'll have what this pretty young lady is having."

Cher laughed, shaking her head. "Don't try to be charming."

"What do you mean?"

"You sound like Harry! 'I'll have what this pretty young lady is having'. That line is more overused than your jeans."

"My jeans aren't overused! You don't know that it's the same pair of jeans I always wear."

"I was there when you bought them! If your bum wasn't so flat, they'd fit you much nicer."

"Blame my genes." Niall took a ship of the Shirley Temple with an approving head nod before thanking the bartender.

"Oh, looky here, the high school dropout using biology terms."

Niall laughed. "Yeah, I'm good like that." He took another sip of his Shirley Temple before turning his head to look at Cher. "You know you're beautiful, right?"

Cher spit out the Shirley Temple back into the glass before spinning to face Niall with wide eyes. "Excuse me?"

Niall just laughed again. "You're a very beautiful woman, I think that was clear."

Cher waved her hands in front of Niall's face, holding up two fingers. "Are you drunk? How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Hey, Steve, bub, do you got any music in this place?"

"No, sorry," Steve said in a husky tone before going to the back of the bar to do whatever it is bartenders do in the backs of bars when they are all by their lonesome.

"I hate doing aca pella all alone, but I'm just going to have to make it work," Niall said with a deep sigh, standing up and holding out his hand to Cher. He took a low bow before asking her, "Care to dance, miss?"

Cher took his hand as she stood up. "Hey! Look at that! We both must be drunk!"

"Nah, I'm sober." He took Cher's other hand and placed it on his shoulder before pulling her closer to him. "If I was drunk, I wouldn't settle for just dancing with you."

"Where is this coming from? All throughout the time at the house you never-"

"Really?" Niall spun her around before pulling her in close again. "You think I never showed any interest?"

"Well…" Cher looked down, watching Niall's feet slowly rock back and forth, careful not to step on her own. "Not that much interest. I just thought you were being polite and returning my own…interest, I mean."

"I actually was never aware of this interest you speak of."

Cher looked up at Niall. "Are you really one hundred percent sure you aren't drunk?"

Niall laughed. "Are you going to keep asking me if I'm drunk or-"

"TWITCAM!" Louis shouted as he strolled into the bar with Liam behind him. "Twitcam! Twitcam! Twitcam! 'Hey, Louis, let's do a twitcam'! Do you do anything with your time besides make twitcams, Liam?"

"I've found needlepoint is quite relaxing, actually," Liam said. He and Louis finally realized that Cher and Niall were also there at the bar. "Oh, hey, you two. Care to join us for an alcohol-free drink?"

"If we go any longer without beer we might turn into mini-Liams and start making twitcams," Louis muttered, looking over the counter for the bartender. "Hey, where's our buddy Steve?"

* * *

Cher went back to her dressing room, back to the seat from before, back to drumming her nails on the table. _"Are you going to keep asking me if I'm drunk or-"_ Or what? Dance with him? Sing? Kiss him? Go back to her Shirley Temple? What came after the "or"? Cher almost fell out of her chair when she heard the knock on the door from her manager.

"Cher, time to go," he said, tapping his watch. "You're taking the red-eye back to London. I'm sorry you couldn't stay for the boys' last show."

"But-" Cher started to say, trying to figure out how to word what she needed to say.

"We really need to go. Don't worry, you'll see the boys when they get back from their next stop on their tour."

Before Cher could really argue, she was whisked out of the room, down a series of halls, and into the van waiting for her in the back, next to the boys' tour bus. She had packed earlier that day, and she knew her bags were probably already at the airport. Once she had gotten there she was moved right through security without too much difficulty (she always seemed to forget to remove at least one piece of jewelry). She was not informed until she was sitting in the terminal that she still had to wait another hour until she could board the plane.

With a sigh Cher opened up her laptop, typed in her password, and went on Twitter. She sent out a quick tweet about how she was stuck in an airport for an hour with a serious lack of food before she glanced at the corner of her screen, checking the time. She tried to make it appear as if she was really only noting the time, but in the back of her mind she was thinking about how the boys had just finished their concert for the night. Sometimes they would go back to her dressing room to ask her if she wanted to join them at the pool or the bar or wherever they might be going. She really hoped someone informed them she would not be there before they did that so they would not think she had skipped out on them. So Niall would not think she ditched him.

After reading through a few tweets sent to her, Cher decided to get some food from one of the small chain restaurants inside the airport. It was almost a half-hour later, and with a full stomach and renewed energy from her walk, she was ready to throw out a quick #askcher tweet to kill some time. She did not even wait to sit down, pulling her laptop out of her large purse and opening it up as she walked closer to the seat she had been in before. She opened the window for Twitter, preparing to type and sit at the same time, a skill that was surprisingly tricky. She had just hit the key for the letter "A" when she felt someone tap her shoulder lightly. Without even seeing them she felt small goose bumps form on her arms as she placed the laptop carefully on the seat. She turned slowly, hoping and praying it was the person she had been longing to see, alone, since the night before.

"Trying to sneak away without a good-bye, Cher?" Niall asked her with a wide grin, raising a blond eyebrow. "I thought I raised you better than that."

"You also said I would never get a tattoo under your roof," Cher responded with a smirk, raising her arms. "Look at what happened." She hit his shoulder lightly. "Besides, you'll be back in England in…a couple months. We'll try to get together then."

Niall stared at her for a second, clearly trying to think of what he wanted to say. "I don't want to get together with you in a couple months in England…"

"Is it my perfume? I knew it was a bit of a strange scent…"

Niall laughed, the tenseness in his shoulders gone. "I didn't mean it like that!" He reached out, taking her hand like he had at the bar the night before. "I didn't just go through airport security for the fun of it. I went through it to get to you. I'm tired of things between us. I know with our kind of lives it's hard to do this, but I want us to try. I want there to be an 'us'."

"I'm leaving in a half-hour," Cher said quietly, stepping a little bit closer to Niall. "Just stay with me until I get on the plane, and I'll call you when I land. We can take it from there."

"Check Twitter."

Cher took a sudden step back. "What?"

"Just do it."

The look that Niall had on his face made Cher turn and pick her laptop back up, reopening the Twitter window. She clicked all the new tweets so she could view them, not really aware of the number of tweets she had received. She scrolled through them as quickly as her computer would allow, skimming them all briefly until she spotted a tweet Niall had posted, most likely from his phone on the way to the airport. She stared at it for a second before almost throwing the laptop on the seat, pulling Niall into a huge hug promptly after. As she pulled away from him she gave him a quick, sweet kiss. She nodded to him, letting him know she wanted to go on with this. All the while, she could only think of the words that were in the most direct indirect tweet she had ever read.

_"Or are we going to continue with this thing called falling in love?"_

* * *

**_Thank you for reading! :) Please review!_**


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